Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  All of which made for perfectly pleasant conversation as they sampled some light predinner wines and popped colorful amuse-bouches into their mouths and spooned up soup, but as the dinner stretched on into dishes that looked more like main courses and that were accompanied by red wine, Richard found himself wishing that they could just grab the Band-Aid and rip it off. The formal purpose of this retreat and this dinner was to celebrate the conclusion of Devin’s year as Writer in Residence and to hand the torch to Don Donald, who had finally polished off his trilogy-turned-tetrakaidecalogy and was ready to devote some time to further development of the backstory and “bible” of T’Rain.

  During the last three months of Devin’s tenure, he had been almost disturbingly productive, leading to an email thread at Corporation 9592 (subject: “Devin Skraelin is an Edgar Allan Poe character”) spattered with links to websites about the psychiatric condition known as graphomania. This had led to a new piece of jargon: Canon Lag, in which the employees responsible for cross-checking Devin’s work and incorporating it into the Canon had been unable to keep pace with his output. According to one somewhat paranoid strain of thought, this had been a deliberate strategy on Devin’s part. Certainly it was the case that, as of this dinner, the only person who had the entire world in his head was Devin, since he had delivered a thousand pages of new material at one o’clock this morning, emailing it from his room in the North Tower of the Schloss, and no one had had time to do more than scan it. So he had everyone else at something of a disadvantage.

  Talk of the Schloss led naturally to a conversation about Don Donald’s castle on the Isle of Man, which had also been the target of heavy renovation work. In that, Richard perceived an opening and made a gambit. “Is that where you anticipate doing most of the T’Rain work?”

  Silence. Richard had probably crossed a boundary, or something, by mentioning “work.” He had found that barreling on ahead was better than apologizing. “Do you have a study there—a suitable place to write?”

  “Most suitable!” the professor exclaimed. He went on to describe a certain room in a turret, “with prospects, on a fair day, west to Donaghadee and north to Cairngaan,” both of which he pronounced so authentically that visible frissons of pleasure radiated down the table. It had been fixed up, he said, in a manner that made it “both authentic and habitable, no easy balance to strike,” and it awaited his return.

  “Devin’s given you a lot to work with,” said Geraldine Levy, who was the mistress of the Canon, seated down the table from Pluto. “I can’t help but wonder if there is any particular part of the story of T’Rain that you’d like to hone in on first.”

  “Home in,” Cameron corrected her, after an awkward few seconds trying to make sense of it. “The question is perfectly reasonable. My answer must be indirect. My method of working, as you may know, is to compose the first draft in the language actually spoken by the characters. Only when this is finished do I begin the work of translating it into English.” Like a tank rotating its turret, he swung around to aim at Devin. “My collaborator, quite naturally, prefers a more … efficient and direct method.”

  “I am in awe of what you do with all the languages and everything,” Devin said. “You’re right. I just … wing it.”

  “So your world,” said D-squared, continuing the pivot until he was aimed at Richard, “has no languages at the moment. You are more fascinated by geology”—he nodded Pluto’s way—“and consider that to be fundamental. I would have started rather with words and language and constructed all upon that foundation.”

  “You have a free hand in the matter now, Doctor Cameron,” Richard pointed out.

  “Almost free. For there have been some”—Cameron turned his eyes back toward Devin—”coinages. I see words in Mr. Skraelin’s work that do not appear in English dictionaries. The very word T’Rain, of course. Then the names of the races: K’Shetriae. D’uinn. These I can work with—can incorporate into fictional languages whose grammar and lexicons I shall be happy to draw up and share with—Miss—Levy.” A hesitation before the “Miss” as he checked her left ring finger and found it vacant.

  Miss Levy was only a “Miss” because lesbians couldn’t get married in the state of Washington, but she was willing to let it slide. “That would be huge for us,” she said. “That part of the Canon is just a gaping void right now.”

  “Happy to be of service. Some questions, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “K’Shetriae. The name of the elven race. Strangely reminiscent of Kshatriya, is it not?”

  Everyone at this end of the table drew a blank except for Nolan. Halfway down the table, though, Premjith Lal, who headed one of their Weird Stuff departments, had pricked up his ears.

  “Yes!” Nolan exclaimed, nodding and smiling. “Now that you mention it—very similar.”

  “Mind explaining it?” Richard asked.

  “Premjith!” Nolan called out. “Are you Kshatriya?”

  Premjith nodded. He was too far away to talk. He reached up with both hands, grabbed his ears, and pulled them up, making them pointy and elven.

  “It is a Hindu caste,” Nolan explained. “The warrior caste.”

  “One cannot help wondering if the person who coined that name might have heard the word ‘Kshatriya’ in some other context and later, when groping for an exotic-sounding sequence of phonemes, pulled it back up, as it were, from memory, thinking that it was an original idea.”

  Richard tried ever so hard not to look at Devin, but it was as if someone had put a crowbar into his ear and kicked it. Within a few seconds everyone was looking at Devin, who was turning red. He killed time for a few moments by sipping from his Diet Coke and fussing with his napkin, then looked up with great confidence and said, “There are only so many phonemes, and only so many combinations of them that you can string together to make words in imaginary languages. Any name you come up with is going to sound like the name of a caste or a god or an irrigation district somewhere in the world. Why not just put your head down and get on with it?”

  Premjith was just barely in range. “There are something like a hundred million Kshatriya who are going to be bemused by this aspect of the Canon,” he pointed out. He wasn’t upset, just … bemused. Richard made a mental note to take Premjith out for sushi and find out if there were any other things he’d noticed seriously wrong with T’Rain that he hadn’t felt like mentioning.

  “Hundred million…” Devin repeated, not loudly enough for Premjith to hear him. “I’ll bet within five years of T’Rain going live, we’ll have more K’Shetriae than there are Kshatriya.”

  “Now, that is—if memory serves—spelt with an apostrophe between an uppercase K and an uppercase S, is it not?” Don Donald asked.

  “That’s right,” said Devin, and glanced at Geraldine, who nodded.

  “Now the apostrophe is used to mark an elision.”

  “A missing letter,” Pluto translated. “Like the o in ‘couldn’t.’ ” He snorted. “The second o, that is!”

  “Yes, just so,” the Don continued. “Which leads me to ask why the S in ‘K’Shetriae’ is capitalized. Should one infer from this that ‘Shetriae’ is a separate word that is a proper noun? And if so, what are we to make of the K-apostrophe? Is it, for example, some sort of article?”

  “Sure, why not,” said Devin.

  D-squared, having set the hook, was content with a few moments’ discreet silence, but Pluto erupted: “Why not? Why not?”

  Richard could only watch, like staring across a valley at an avalanche overtaking a skier.

  “If it is an article,” said Don Donald, “then what is the T-apostrophe in T’Rain? What is the D-apostrophe in D’uinn? How many articles does this language have?”

  Silence.

  “Or perhaps the K, the T, and the D are not articles but some other features of the language.”

  Silence.

  “Or perhaps the apostrophe is being used to indicate something other than elision.”
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br />   Silence.

  “In which case, what does it indicate?”

  Richard couldn’t bear it anymore. “It just looks cool,” he said.

  Don Donald turned toward him with a bright, fascinated look. Behind him, Richard could see everyone else collapsing; things had gotten a bit tense.

  “I beg your pardon, Richard?”

  “Donald, look. You’re the only guy in this particular sector of the economy who has the whole ancient-languages thing down pat to the extent that you do. Everyone else just totally makes this stuff up. When some guy wants a word that seems exotic, he’ll throw in a couple of apostrophes. Maybe smash a couple of letters together that don’t normally go, like Q and Z. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

  Silence in a different flavor.

  “I am aware that it doesn’t exactly jibe with your M.O.,” Richard added.

  “M.O.?”

  “Modus operandi.”

  “Mmm,” said the Don.

  “If you want to make up some languages,” offered Devin, “knock yourself out.”

  “Mmm,” the Don said again.

  Richard glanced at Geraldine, who was thinking so hard that coils of smoke were rising from her sensible hairdo.

  “Mr. Olszewski,” the Don finally said, “may I plant a volcano here?”

  “Here!?”

  “Yes, on the site of this property.”

  “Any particular type of volcano you had in mind?”

  “Oh, let’s say a Mount Etna. I’ve always favored that one.”

  “No way,” said Pluto. “That is a highly active, young stratovolcano. The Selkirks aren’t that geologically active. The type of rock here—”

  “It simply wouldn’t make sense,” said the Don, summing up and cutting short what promised to be a long and devastatingly particular tour of the world of volcanology. “It would be incoherent.”

  “Totally!”

  “I fear that an analogous situation may obtain in the case of all these apostrophes. My colleague has refrained from coining words, it is true. But it has been necessary, hasn’t it, to coin names for the races of T’Rain, and indeed for the world itself. And in some cases, such as ‘K’Shetriae’, the apostrophe is followed by a capitalized letter, while in others, as ‘D’uinn,’ the following letter is lowercase, a situation that requires some sort of coherent explanation. At least if I am to proceed with my work in the manner to which I am accustomed.”

  Richard noted the implicit threat there.

  “THANKS FOR COMING all the way out from Vancouver,” Peter said. They had not introduced themselves, or shaken hands, just sized each other up and confirmed with nods that they were who they were.

  “This is a hell of a place,” said Wallace. He did not seem like the kind of man who was utterly confounded—or would admit to it, anyway—very often. For a good half minute he had eyes for nothing but the interlocking timbers that pretended to hold up the roof. “Where have I seen those before?” Then his eyes dropped to regard Peter, who was eyeing him somewhat warily. He turned his attention back to the tavern: its rustic furniture, its leaded glass windows, its floor of pegged wooden planks. But finally it was the silverware that tipped him off. He picked up a fork and stared in amazement at the motif stamped into its handle: a raw geometric pattern inspired by Nordic runes. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “Dwinn!”

  “I beg your pardon?” Peter said, aghast at how this was going.

  Wallace cracked up—another thing that, one suspected, he didn’t do often—and cast a glance at his laptop bag, which he’d left sitting on the empty chair next to him. “I could show you,” he said. “I could go to this place right now, in T’Rain.”

  “You play T’Rain?” Peter inquired, seeing in this an opportunity for, at least, a conversational gambit.

  “We all have our vices. Each brings its own brand of trouble. That connected with an addiction to T’Rain is less dangerous than many I could name. Speaking of which, what does a man have to do to get a club soda in this place?” Wallace spoke with a Scottish accent, which came as a surprise to Peter and created a one-second time lag in all Peter’s responses as he worked to understand what Wallace had just said. But once he’d parsed “club soda,” he turned in his chair, half rose, and secured the attention of a waiter.

  Peter did not yet like the way the conversation was going. Wallace had thrown him completely off-balance by making the conversation about T’Rain and had pressed him into service as drink fetcher. Now, though, Wallace changed his attitude a bit, explaining himself, as if educating Peter. Doing him a favor. “This is the feast hall of King Oglo of the Northern Red Dwinn. I’ve been in it ten, maybe fifteen times.”

  “You mean, your character’s been in it.”

  “Yes, that is what I mean,” said Wallace, and he didn’t have to add you fucking shite-for-brains.

  Wallace had come into the place wearing an overcoat, a garment that Peter had seen only in movies. Probably the only overcoat within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. A gentleman’s garment. About him were various other faint traces of white collarness. His red-going-white hair had been slicked back from his sun-mottled forehead, which sported a divot above the left temple where a skin cancer had been rooted out. Reading glasses hung on a gold chain from his neck. His shirt was open at the neck. Its sheer fabric would look good beneath a sharp suit but would afford him very little protection if he had to stop and change a tire. His right hand was anchored by a fat gold signet ring.

  “I don’t play T’Rain myself,” Peter said, though this seemed pretty obvious by this point.

  “What games do you play?”

  “I like snowboarding. Shooting. Sometimes I—”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, what’s your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?” Wallace tapped his signet ring on the table.

  Peter was silent for a few moments.

  “And don’t try to tell me that there is none, because we both know why we’re here.” Tap tap tap.

  “Yeah,” said Peter, “but that doesn’t mean it’s because of a vice.”

  Wallace laughed, and not in the delighted way he’d laughed when he had recognized that he was sitting in the feast hall of King Oglo. “You reached me through certain individuals in Ukraine who are not exactly solid citizens. I checked you out. I have read all the postings you made, starting at the age of twelve, in hacker chat rooms, written in that ridiculous fucking spelling that you all use. Three years ago you went on record under your real name calling yourself a gray-hat hacker, which is as good as admitting that you were a black-hat before. And a year ago you signed on with this security consultancy where half of the founders have done time, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Look. What do you want me to say? We’re here. We’re having this meeting. We both know why. So it’s not like I’ve been lying to you.”

  “Very true. What I’m trying to establish is that you have been lying to everyone else, including, I’d guess, your cappuccino girlfriend over there. And it’s helpful for me to know what vices or troubles led you to tell those lies.”

  “Why? I’ve got what you came for.”

  “That’s what I am trying to establish.”

  Peter reached into a large external pocket of his coat and pulled out a DVD case containing a single unmarked disk, white on top, iridescent purple on the bottom. “Here it is.”

  Wallace looked disgusted. “That’s how you want to deliver it?”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “I brought a notebook computer. No DVD slot. Rather hoped you’d bring it on a thumb drive.”

  Peter considered this. “I think that can be arranged. Hold on a second.”

  “THAT GUY JUST tasked your boyfriend,” Richard remarked, shortly after Peter had sat down across from the stranger by the fire.

  “Tasked?”

  “Gave him a job to do. ‘Get the waiter’s attention. Order me a drink.’ Something of that nature.”

/>   “I don’t follow.”

  “It’s a tactic,” Richard said. “When you’ve just met someone and you’re trying to feel them out. Give them a task and see how they react. If they accept the task, you can move on and give them a bigger one later.”

  “Is it a tactic you use?”

  “No, it’s manipulative. Either someone works for me or they don’t. If they work for me, I can assign them tasks and it’s fine. If they don’t work for me, then I have no business assigning them tasks.”

  “So you’re saying that Peter’s friend is manipulating him.”

  “Acquaintance.”

  “It’s some kind of business contact,” Zula guessed.

  “Then why didn’t he just come out and say so?”

  “That’s a good question,” Zula said. “He’s probably afraid I’d be mad at him if he interrupted our vacation for a business meeting.”

  So he lied to you? Richard thought better of actually saying this. If he pushed too hard, he might get the opposite result from what he wanted.

  Besides, Peter was now headed back over to the table.

  “Does either of you have a thumb drive I could use?”

  The question hung there like an invisible cloud of flatulence.

  “I want to transfer some pictures between computers,” he explained.

  Richard and Zula and Peter had all been lounging around the place for a while, occasionally checking email or messing around with vacation photos, and so Richard had his laptop bag between his feet. He pulled it up into his lap and groped around in an external pocket. “Here you go,” he said.

  “I’ll get it right back to you,” Peter said.

  “Don’t bother,” Richard said, peeved, in a completely school-marmish way, by Peter’s failure to use the magic words. “It’s too small. I was going to buy a new one tomorrow. Just erase whatever’s on it, okay?”